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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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While most of the post is accurate and well-stated, two opinions particular caught my eye. I'll be nice and call them opinions, since these are blogs, and always subject to interpretation. I'll put quotes around them so that people will correctly relate these to Hu, and not me.

"Storage virtualization can only be done in a storage controller. Currently Hitachi is the only vendor to provide this."-- Hu Yoshida

Hu, I enjoy all of your blog entries, but you should know better. HDS is fairly new-comer to the storage virtualization arena, so since IBM has been doing this for decades, I will bring you and the rest of the readers up to speed. I am not starting a blog-fight, just want to provide some additional information for clients to consider when making choices in the marketplace.

First, let's clarify the terminology. I will use 'storage' in the broad sense, including anything that can hold 1's and 0's, including memory, spinning disk media, and plastic tape media. These all have different mechanisms and access methods, based on their physical geometry and characteristics. The concept of 'virtualization' is any technology that makes one set of resources look like another set of resources with more preferable characteristics, and this applies to storage as well as servers and networks. Finally, 'storage controller' is any device with the intelligence to talk to a server and handle its read and write requests.

Second, let's take a look at all the different flavors of storage virtualization that IBM has developed over the past 30 years.

1972

IBM introduces the S/370 with the OS/VS1 operating system. "VS" here refers to virtual storage, and in this case internal server memory was swapped out to physical disk. Using a table mapping, disk was made to look like an extension of main memory.

1974

IBM introduces the IBM 3850 Mass Storage System (MSS). Until this time, programs that ran on mainframes had to be acutely aware of the device types being written, as each device type had different block, track and cylinder sizes, so a program written for one device type would have to be modified to work with a different device type. The MSS was able to take four 3350 disks, and a lot of tapes, and make them look like older 3330 disks, since most programs were still written for the 3330 format. The MSS was a way to deliver new 3350 disk to a 3330-oriented ecosystem, and greatly reduce the cost by handling tape on the back end. The table mapping was one virtual 3330 disk (100 MB) to two physical tapes (50 MB each). Back then, all of the mainframe disk systems had separate controllers. The 3850 used a 3831 controller that talked to the servers.

1978

IBM invents Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) technology. The table mapping is one or more virtual "Logical Units" (or "LUNs") to two or more physical disks. Data is striped, mirrored and paritied across the physical drives, making the LUNs look and feel like disks, but with faster performance and higher reliability than the physical drives they were mapped to. RAID could be implemented in the server as software, on top or embedded into the operating system, in the host bus adapter, or on the controller itself. The vendor that provided the RAID software or HBA did not have to be the same as the vendor that provided the disk, so in a sense, this avoided "vendor lock-in".Today, RAID is almost always done in the external storage controller.

1981

IBM introduces the Personal Computer. One of the features of DOS is the ability to make a "RAM drive". This is technology that runs in the operating system to make internal memory look and feel like an external drive letter. Applications that already knew how to read and write to drive letters could work unmodified with these new RAM drives. This had the advantage that the files would be erased when the system was turned off, so it was perfect for temporary files. Of course, other operating systems today have this feature, UNIX has a /tmp directory in memory, and z/OS uses VIO storage pools.

This is important, as memory would be made to look like disk externally, as "cache", in the 1990s.

1990

IBM AIX v3 introduces Logical Volume Manager (LVM). LVM maps the LUNs from external RAID controllers into virtual disks inside the UNIX server. The mapping can combine the capacity of multiple physical LUNs into a large internal volume. This was all done by software within the server, completely independent of the storage vendor, so again no lock-in.

1997

IBM introduces the Virtual Tape Server (VTS). This was a disk array that emulated a tape library. A mapping of virtual tapes to physical tapes was done to allow full utilization of larger and larger tape cartridges. While many people today mistakenly equate "storage virtualization" with "disk virtualization", in reality it can be implemented on other forms of storage. The disk array was referred to as the "Tape Volume Cache". By using disk, the VTS could mount an empty "scratch" tape instantaneously, since no physical tape had to be mounted for this purpose.

Contradicting its "tape is dead" mantra, EMC later developed its CLARiiON disk library that emulates a virtual tape library (VTL).

2003

IBM introduces the SAN Volume Controller. It involves mapping virtual disks to manage disks that could be from different frames from different vendors. Like other controllers, the SVC has multiple processors and cache memory, with the intelligence to talk to servers, and is similar in functionality to the controller components you might find inside monolithic "controller+disk" configurations like the IBM DS8300, EMC Symmetrix, or HDS TagmaStore USP. SVC can map the virtual disk to physical disk one-for-one in "image mode", as HDS does, or can also map virtual disks across physical managed disks, using a similar mapping table, to provide advantages like performance improvement through striping. You can take any virtual disk out of the SVC system simply by migrating it back to "image mode" and disconnecting the LUN from management. Again, no vendor lock-in.

The HDS USP and NSC can run as regular disk systems without virtualization, or the virtualization can be enabled to allow external disks from other vendors. HDS usually counts all USP and NSC sold, but never mention what percentage these have external disks attached in virtualization mode. Either they don't track this, or too embarrassed to publish the number. (My guess: single digit percentage).

Few people remember that IBM also introduced virtualization in both controller+disk and SAN switch form factors. The controller+disk version was called "SAN Integration Server", but people didn't like the "vendor lock-in" having to buy the internal disk from IBM. They preferred having it all external disk, with plenty of vendor choices. This is perhaps why Hitachi now offers a disk-less version of the NSC 55, in an attempt to be more like IBM's SVC.

IBM also had introduced the IBM SVC for Cisco 9000 blade. Our clients didn't want to upgrade their SAN switch networking gear just to get the benefits of disk virtualization. Perhaps this is the same reason EMC has done so poorly with its "Invista" offering.

So, bottom line, storage virtualization can, and has, been delivered in the operating system software, in the server's host bus adapter, inside SAN switches, and in storage controllers. It can be delivered anywhere in the path between application and physical media. Today, the two major vendors that provide disk virtualization "in the storage controller" are IBM and HDS, and the three major vendors that provide tape virtualization "in the storage controller" are IBM, Sun/STK, and EMC. All of these involve a mapping of logical to physical resources. Hitachi uses a one-for-one mapping, whereas IBM additionally offers more sophisticated mappings as well.

You may not be the right person to ask but I am asking everyone so "How do you see hybrid disk drives?"

(For the record, I am not immediately related to Robert. At onepoint, "Pearson" was the 12th most common surname in the USA, but now doesn't even make the Top 100.)

Robert, I would like to encourage you and everyone else to ask questions, don't worry if I am the wrong person to ask, asprobably I know the right person within IBM. Some people have called me the "Kevin Bacon" of Storage,as I am often less than six degrees away from the right person, having worked in IBM Storage for over 20 years.

For those not familiar with hybrid drives, there is a good write-up in Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, most of the people I would consult on this question, such as those from Market Intelligence or Research, are on vacation for the holidays, so, Robert, I will have to rely on my trusted 78-card Tarot deck and answer you with a five-card throw.

Your first card, Robert, is the Hermit. This card represents "introspection". The best I/O is no I/O, which means that if applications can keep the information they need inside server memory, you can avoid the bus bandwidth limitations to going to external storage devices. Where external storage makes sense is when data is shared between servers, or when the single server is limited to a set amount of internal memory. So, consider maxing out the memory in your server first (IBM would be glad to sell you more internal memory!!!), then consider outside solid-state or hybrid devices. Windows for example has an architectural limit of 4GB.

Your second card, Robert, is the Four of Cups, representing "apathy".On the card, you see three cups together, with the fourth cup being delivered from a cloud. This reminds me thatwe have three storage tiers already (memory,disk,tape), and introducing a fourth tier into the mix may not garnermuch excitement. For the mainframe, IBM introduced a Solid-State Device, call the Coupling Facility, which can be accessed from multipleSystem z servers. It is used heavily by DFSMS and DB2 to hold shared information. However, given some customer's apathytowards Information Lifecycle Management which includes "tiered storage", introducing yet another tier that forcespeople to decide what data goes where may be another challenge.

Your third card, Robert, is the Chariot, which represents "Speed, Determination,and Will". In some cases, solid state disk are faster for reading, but can be slower for writing. In the case of ahybrid drive, where the memory acts as a front-end cache, read-hits would be faster, but read-misses might be slower.While the idea of stopping the drives during inactivity will reduce power consumption, spinning up and slowing downthe disk may incur additional performance penalties. At the time of this post, the fastest disk system remains the IBM SAN Volume Controller, based on SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmarks in excess of those published for other devices.

Your fourth card, Robert, is the Eight of Pentacles, which represents"Diligence, Hard work". The pentacles are coins with five-sided stars on them, and this often represents money.Our research team has projected that spinning disk will continue to be a viable and profitable storage media for at least anothereight years.

Your fifth and last card, Robert, is the World, which normallyrepresents "Accomplishment", but since it is turned upside down, the meaning is reversed to "Limitation". Some Hybriddisks, and some types of solid state memory in general, do have limitations in the number of write cycles they can handle. For thoseunhappy with the frequency and slowness for rebuilds on SATA disk may find similar problems with hybrid drives.For that reason, businesses may not trust using hybrid drives for their busiest, mission-critical applications, but certainlymight use it for archive data with lower write-cycle requirements.

The tarot cards are never wrong, but certainly interpretations of the cards can be.

Jon Toigo has a funny cartoon on his post, [As I Listen to EMC Brag on “New” Functionality…]. Basically, it pokes fun that many of us bloggers argue which vendor was first to introduce some technology or another. We all do this, myself included.

Recently, Claus Mikkelsen's, currently with HDS, [brought up accurately some past history from the 1990s], which is before many storage bloggers hired on with their current employers. Claus and I worked together for IBM back then, so I recognized many of the events he mentions that I can't talk about either. In many cases, IBM or HDS delivered new features before EMC.

I've been reading with some amusement as fellow blogger Barry Burke asked Claus a series of questions about Hitachi's latest High Availability Manager (HAM) feature. Claus was too busy with his "day job" and chose to shut Barry down. Sadly, HDS set themselves up for ridicule this round, first by over-hyping a function before its announcement, and then announcing a feature that IBM and EMC have offered for a while. The problem and confusion for many is that each vendor uses different terminology. Hitachi's HAM is similar to IBM's HyperSwap and EMC's AutoSwap. The implementations are different, of course, which is often why vendors are often asked to compare and contrast one implementation to another.

In his latest response,[how to mind the future of a mission-critical world], Barry reports that several HDS bloggers now censor his comments.That's too bad. I don't censor comments, within reason, including Barry's inane questions about IBM's products, and am glad that he does not censor my inane questions to him about EMC products in return. The entire blogosphere benefits from these exchanges, even if they are a bit heated sometimes.

We all have day jobs, and often are just too busy, or too lazy, to read dozens or hundreds of pages of materials, if we can even find them in the first place. Not everyone has the luxury of a "competitive marketing" team to help do the research for you, so if we can get an accurate answer or clarification about a product that is generally available directly from a vendor's subject matter expert, I am all for that.

It's official! My "blook" Inside System Storage - Volume I is now available.

This blog-based book, or “blook”, comprises the first twelve months of posts from this Inside System Storage blog,165 posts in all, from September 1, 2006 to August 31, 2007. Foreword by Jennifer Jones. 404 pages.

IT storage and storage networking concepts

IBM strategy, hardware, software and services

Disk systems, Tape systems, and storage networking

Storage and infrastructure management software

Second Life, Facebook, and other Web 2.0 platforms

IBM’s many alliances, partners and competitors

How IT storage impacts society and industry

You can choose between hardcover (with dust jacket) or paperback versions:

This is not the first time I've been published. I have authored articles for storage industry magazines, written large sections of IBM publications and manuals, submitted presentations and whitepapers to conference proceedings, and even had a short story published with illustrations by the famous cartoon writer[Ted Rall].

But I can say this is my first blook, and as far as I can tell, the first blook from IBM's many bloggers on DeveloperWorks, and the first blook about the IT storage industry.I got the idea when I saw [Lulu Publishing] run a "blook" contest. The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks"--books based on blogs or other websites, including webcomics. The [Lulu Blooker Blog] lists past year winners. Lulu is one of the new innovative "print-on-demand" publishers. Rather than printing hundredsor thousands of books in advance, as other publishers require, Lulu doesn't print them until you order them.

I considered cute titles like A Year of Living Dangerously, orAn Engineer in Marketing La-La land, or Around the World in 165 Posts, but settled on a title that matched closely the name of the blog.

In addition to my blog posts, I provide additional insights and behind-the-scenes commentary. If you go to the Luluwebsite above, you can preview an entire chapter in its entirety before purchase. I have added a hefty 56-page Glossary of Acronyms and Terms (GOAT) with over 900 storage-related terms defined, which also doubles as an index back to the post (or posts) that use or further explain each term.

So who might be interested in this blook?

Business Partners and Sales Reps looking to give a nice gift to their best clients and colleagues

Managers looking to reward early-tenure employees and retain the best talent

IT specialists and technicians wanting a marketing perspective of the storage industry

Mentors interested in providing motivation and encouragement to their proteges

Educators looking to provide books for their classroom or library collection

Authors looking to write a blook themselves, to see how to format and structure a finished product

Marketing personnel that want to better understand Web 2.0, Second Life and social networking

Analysts and journalists looking to understand how storage impacts the IT industry, and society overall

College graduates and others interested in a career as a storage administrator

And yes, according to Lulu, if you order soon, you can have it by December 25.

In North America, today marks the start of the "Give 1 Get 1" program.

Children using the XO laptop

I first learned from this when I was reading about Timothy Ferriss' [LitLiberation project] on his [Four Hour Work Week] blog, and was surfing around for related ideas, and chanced upon this. I registered for a reminder, and it came today(the reminder, not the laptop itself).

Here's how the program works. You give $399 US dollars to the "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC)[laptop.org] organization for two laptops: One goes to a deserving child ina developing country, the second goes to you, for your own child, or to donate to a localcharity that helps children. This counts as a $199 purchase plus a $200 tax-deductible donation.For Americans, this is a [US 501(c)(3)] donation, and for Canadians and Mexicans, take advantage of the low-value of the US dollar!

If your employer matches donations, like IBM does, get them to match the $200donation for a third laptop, which goes to another child in a developing country. As for shipping, you pay only for the shipping of the one to you, each receiving country covers their own shipping. In my case, the shipping was another $24 US dollars for Arizona.No guarantees that it will arrive in time for the holidays this December, but it might.

To sweeten the deal, T-mobile throws in a year's worth of "Wi-Fi Hot Spot"that you can use for yourself, either with the XO laptop itself, or your regular laptop, iPhone, or otherWi-Fi enabled handheld device.

National Public Radio did a story last week on this:[The $100 Laptop Heads for Uganda]where they interview actor [Masi Oka], best known from the TV show ["Heroes"], who has agreed to be their spokesman.At the risk of sounding like their other spokesman, I thought I would cover the technology itself, inside the XO,and how this laptop represents IBM's concept of "Innovation that matters"!

The project was started by [Nicholas Negroponte] from [MIT University] as the "$100 laptop project". Once the final designwas worked out, it turns out it costs $188 US dollars to make, so they rounded it up to $200. This is stillan impressive price, and requires that hundreds of thousands of them be manufactured to justify ramping upthe assembly line.

Two of IBM's technology partners are behind this project. First is Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that providesthe 433Mhz x86 processor, which is 75 percent slower than Thinkpad T60. Second is Red Hat,as this runs lean Fedora 6 version of Linux. Obviously, you couldn't have Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X, as both require significantly more resources.

The laptop is "child size", and would be considered in the [subnotebook] category. At 10" x 9" x 1.25", it is about the size of class textbook,can be carried easily in a child's backpack, or carried by itself with the integrated handle. When closed, it is sealedenough to be protected when carried in rain or dust storms. It weighs about 3.5 pounds, less than the 5.2 pounds of myThinkpad T60.

The XO is "green", not just in color, but also in energy consumption.This laptop can be powered by AC, or human power hand-crank, with workin place to get options for car-battery or solar power charging. Compared to the 20W normally consumed bytraditional laptops, the XO consumes 90 percent less, running at 2W or less. To accomplish this, there is no spinning disk inside. Instead, a 1GB FLASH drive holds 700MB of Linux, and gives you 300MB to hold your files. There isa slot for an MMC/SD flash card, and three USB 2.0 ports to connect to USB keys, printers or other remote I/O peripherals.

The XO flips around into three positions:

Standard

Standard laptop position has screen and keyboard. The water-tight keyboard comes in ten languages:International/English, Thai, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, West African, Urdu, Mongolian, Cyrillic, and Amharic.(I learned some Amharic, having lived five years with Ethiopians.)There does not appear be a VGA port, so don't be thinking this could be used as an alternative to project Powerpoint presentations onto a big screen.

Built-in 640x480 webcam, microphone and speakers allow the XO to be used as a communication device. Voice-over-IP (VOIP) client software, similar to Skype or [IBM Lotus Sametime], is pre-installed for this purpose.

The basic built-in communication are 802.1g (54Mbs) that you can use to surf the web usingthe Wi-Fi at your local Starbucks; and 802.1s which forms a "mesh network" with other XO laptops, and can surf theweb finding the one laptop nearby that is connected to the internet to share bandwidth. This eliminates the need to build a separate Wi-Fi hub at the school. There are USB-to-Ethernet and USB-to-Cellular converters, so that might be an alternative option.

For kids who want to learn how to program, the Python, Javascript, Logo and Squeak languages are included.Since the machine runs Linux, it can be modified as needed to fit individual needs of each country.

E-book

Flipped vertically, the device can be read like a book.The screen can be changed between full-color and black-white, 200 dpi, with decent 1200x900 pixel resolution. The full-color is back-lit, and can be read in low-lighting. The black-white is not back-lit, consumes much less power, andcan be read in bright sunlight. In that regards, it is comparable to other [e-book devices], like a Cybook or Sony Reader.

Software includes a web-browser, document reader, word processor and RSS feed reader to read blogs.The OLPC identifies all of the software, libraries and interfaces they use, so that anyone that wants to developchildren software for this platform can do so.

Game mode

With the keyboard flipped back, the 6" x 4.5" screen has directional controls and X/Y/A/B buttons to run games. This would make it comparable to a Nintendo DS or Playstation Portable (PSP). Again, the choice between back-lit color,or sunlight black-white screen modes apply. Some games are pre-installed.

So for $399, you could buy a Wi-Fi enabled[16GB iPod Touch] for yourself, which does much the same thing, or you can make a difference in the world.I made my donation this morning, and suggest you--my dear readers in the US, Canada and Mexico--consider doing the same.Go to [www.laptopgiving.org] for details.

Well, this week I am in Maryland, just outside of Washington DC. It's a bit cold here.

Robin Harris over at StorageMojo put out this Open Letter to Seagate, Hitachi GST, EMC, HP, NetApp, IBM and Sun about the results of two academic papers, one from Google, and another from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The papers imply that the disk drive module (DDM) manufacturers have perhaps misrepresented their reliability estimates, and asks major vendors to respond. So far, NetAppand EMC have responded.

I will not bother to re-iterate or repeat what others have said already, but make just a few points. Robin, you are free to consider this "my" official response if you like to post it on your blog, or point to mine, whatever is easier for you. Given that IBM no longer manufacturers the DDMs we use inside our disk systems, there may not be any reason for a more formal response.

Coke and Pepsi buy sugar, Nutrasweet and Splenda from the same sources

Somehow, this doesn't surprise anyone. Coke and Pepsi don't own their own sugar cane fields, and even their bottlers are separate companies. Their job is to assemble the components using super-secret recipes to make something that tastes good.

IBM, EMC and NetApp don't make DDMs that are mentioned in either academic study. Different IBM storage systems uses one or more of the following DDM suppliers:

In the past, corporations like IBM was very "vertically-integrated", making every component of every system delivered.IBM was the first to bring disk systems to market, and led the major enhancements that exist in nearly all disk drives manufactured today. Today, however, our value-add is to take standard components, and use our super-secret recipe to make something that provides unique value to the marketplace. Not surprisingly, EMC, HP, Sun and NetApp also don't make their own DDMs. Hitachi is perhaps the last major disk systems vendor that also has a DDM manufacturing division.

So, my point is that disk systems are the next layer up. Everyone knows that individual components fail. Unlike CPUs or Memory, disks actually have moving parts, so you would expect them to fail more often compared to just "chips".

If you don't feel the MTBF or AFR estimates posted by these suppliers are valid, go after them, not the disk systems vendors that use their supplies. While IBM does qualify DDM suppliers for each purpose, we are basically purchasing them from the same major vendors as all of our competitors. I suspect you won't get much more than the responses you posted from Seagate and HGST.

American car owners replace their cars every 59 months

According to a frequently cited auto market research firm, the average time before the original owner transfers their vehicle -- purchased or leased -- is currently 59 months.Both studies mention that customers have a different "definition" of failure than manufacturers, and often replace the drives before they are completely kaput. The same is true for cars. Americans give various reasons why they trade in their less-than-five-year cars for newer models. Disk technologies advance at a faster pace, so it makes sense to change drives for other business reasons, for speed and capacity improvements, lower power consumption, and so on.

The CMU study indicated that 43 percent of drives were replaced before they were completely dead.So, if General Motors estimated their cars lasted 9 years, and Toyota estimated 11 years, people still replace them sooner, for other reasons.

At IBM, we remind people that "data outlives the media". True for disk, and true for tape. Neither is "permanent storage", but rather a temporary resting point until the data is transferred to the next media. For this reason, IBM is focused on solutions and disk systems that plan for this inevitable migration process. IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller is able to move active data from one disk system to another; IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is able to move backup copies from one tape to another; and IBM System Storage DR550 is able to move archive copies from disk and tape to newer disk and tape.

If you had only one car, then having that one and only vehicle die could be quite disrupting. However, companies that have fleet cars, like Hertz Car Rentals, don't wait for their cars to completely stop running either, they replace them well before that happens. For a large company with a large fleet of cars, regularly scheduled replacement is just part of doing business.

This brings us to the subject of RAID. No question that RAID 5 provides better reliability than having just a bunch of disks (JBOD). Certainly, three copies of data across separate disks, a variation of RAID 1, will provide even more protection, but for a price.

Robin mentions the "Auto-correlation" effect. Disk failures bunch up, so one recent failure might mean another DDM, somewhere in the environment, will probably fail soon also. For it to make a difference, it would (a) have to be a DDM in the same RAID 5 rank, and (b) have to occur during the time the first drive is being rebuilt to a spare volume.

The human body replaces skin cells every day

So there are individual DDMs, manufactured by the suppliers above; disk systems, manufactured by IBM and others, and then your entire IT infrastructure. Beyond the disk system, you probably have redundant fabrics, clustered servers and multiple data paths, because eventually hardware fails.

People might realize that the human body replaces skin cells every day. Other cells are replaced frequently, within seven days, and others less frequently, taking a year or so to be replaced. I'm over 40 years old, but most of my cells are less than 9 years old. This is possible because information, data in the form of DNA, is moved from old cells to new cells, keeping the infrastructure (my body) alive.

Our clients should approach this in a more holistic view. You will replace disks in less than 3-5 years. While tape cartridges can retain their data for 20 years, most people change their tape drives every 7-9 years, and so tape data needs to be moved from old to new cartridges. Focus on your information, not individual DDMs.

What does this mean for DDM failures. When it happens, the disk system re-routes requests to a spare disk, rebuilding the data from RAID 5 parity, giving storage admins time to replace the failed unit. During the few hours this process takes place, you are either taking a backup, or crossing your fingers.Note: for RAID5 the time to rebuild is proportional to the number of disks in the rank, so smaller ranks can be rebuilt faster than larger ranks. To make matters worse, the slower RPM speeds and higher capacities of ATA disks means that the rebuild process could take longer than smaller capacity, higher speed FC/SCSI disk.

According to the Google study, a large portion of the DDM replacements had no SMART errors to warn that it was going to happen. To protect your infrastructure, you need to make sure you have current backups of all your data. IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center can help identify all the data that is "at risk", those files that have no backup, no copy, and no current backup since the file was most recently changed. A well-run shop keeps their "at risk" files below 3 percent.

So, where does that leave us?

ATA drives are probably as reliable as FC/SCSI disk. Customers should chose which to use based on performance and workload characteristics. FC/SCSI drives are more expensive because they are designed to run at faster speeds, required by some enterprises for some workloads. IBM offers both, and has tools to help estimate which products are the best match to your requirements.

RAID 5 is just one of the many choices of trade-offs between cost and protection of data. For some data, JBOD might be enough. For other data that is more mission critical, you might choose keeping two or three copies. Data protection is more than just using RAID, you need to also consider point-in-time copies, synchronous or asynchronous disk mirroring, continuous data protection (CDP), and backup to tape media. IBM can help show you how.

Disk systems, and IT environments in general, are higher-level concepts to transcend the failures of individual components. DDM components will fail. Cache memory will fail. CPUs will fail. Choose a disk systems vendor that combines technologies in unique and innovative ways that take these possibilities into account, designed for no single point of failure, and no single point of repair.

So, Robin, from IBM's perspective, our hands are clean. Thank you for bringing this to our attention and for giving me the opportunity to highlight IBM's superiority at the systems level.

( I cannot take credit for coining the new term "bleg". I saw this term firstused over on the [FreakonomicsBlog]. If you have not yet read the book "Freakonomics", I highly recommend it! The authors' blog is excellent as well.)

For this comparison, it is important to figure out how much workload a mainframe can support, how much an x86 cansupport, and then divide one from the other. Sounds simple enough, right? And what workload should you choose?IBM chose a business-oriented "data-intensive" workload using Oracle database. (If you wanted instead a scientific"compute-intensive" workload, consider an [IBM supercomputer] instead, the most recent of which clocked in over 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second, or PetaFLOP.) IBM compares the following two systems:

Sun Fire X2100 M2, model 1220 server (2-way)

IBM did not pick a wimpy machine to compare against. The model 1220 is the fastest in the series, with a 2.8Ghz x86-64 dual-core AMD Opteron processor, capable of running various levels of Solaris, Linux or Windows.In our case, we will use Oracle workloads running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.All of the technical specifications are available at the[Sun Microsystems Sun Fire X1200] Web site.I am sure that there are comparable models from HP, Dell or even IBM that could have been used for this comparison.

IBM z10 Enterprise Class mainframe model E64 (64-way)

This machine can run a variety of operating systems also, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The E64 has four "multiple processor modules" called"processor books" for a total of 77 processing units: 64 central processors, 11 system assist processors (SAP) and 2 spares. That's right, spare processors, in case any others gobad, IBM has got your back. You can designate a central processor in a variety of flavors. For running z/VM and Linux operating systems, the central processors can be put into "Integrated Facility for Linux" (IFL) mode.On IT Jungle, Timothy Patrick Morgan explains the z10 EC in his article[IBM Launches 64-Way z10 Enterprise Class Mainframe Behemoth]. For more information on the z10 EC, see the 110-page [Technical Introduction], orread the specifications on the[IBM z10 EC] Web site.

In a shop full of x86 servers, there are production servers, test and development servers, quality assuranceservers, standby idle servers for high availability, and so on. On average, these are only 10 percent utilized.For example, consider the following mix of servers:

1250 machines for test, development and quality assurance, running at 5 percent average utilization

While [some might question, dispute or challenge thisten percent] estimate, it matches the logic used to justify VMware, XEN, Virtual Iron or other virtualization technologies. Running 10 to 20 "virtual servers" on a single physical x86 machine assumes a similar 5-10 percent utilization rate.

Note: The following paragraphs have been revised per comments received.

Now the math. Jon, I want to make it clear I was not involved in writing the press release nor assisted with thesemath calculations. Please, don't shoot the messenger! Remember this cartoon where two scientists in white lab coats are writing mathcalculations on a chalkboard, and in the middle there is "and then a miracle happens..." to continue the rest ofthe calculations?

In this case, the miracle is the number that compares one server hardware platform to another. I am not going to bore people with details like the number of concurrent processor threads or the differencesbetween L1 and L3 cache. IBM used sophisticated tools and third party involvement that I am not allowed to talk about, and I have discussed this post with lawyers representing four (now five) different organizations already,so for the purposes of illustration and explanation only, I have reverse-engineered a new z10-to-Opteron conversion factor as 6.866 z10 EC MIPS per GHz of dual-core AMD Opteron for I/O-intensive workloads running only 10 percent average CPU utilization. Business applications that perform a lot of I/O don't use their CPU as much as other workloads.For compute-intensive or memory-intensive workloads, the conversion factor may be quite different, like 200 MIPS per GHz, as Jeff Savit from Sun Microsystems points out in the comments below.

Keep in mind that each processor is different, and we now have Intel, AMD, SPARC, PA-RISC and POWER (and others); 32-bit versus 64-bit; dual-core and quad-core; and different co-processor chip sets to worry about. AMD Opteron processors come in different speeds, but we are comparing against the 2.8GHz, so 1500 times 6.866 times 2.8 is 28,337. Since these would be running as Linux guestsunder z/VM, we add an additional 7 percent overhead or 2,019 MIPS. We then subtract 15 percent for "smoothing", whichis what happens when you consolidate workloads that have different peaks and valleys in workload, or 4,326 MIPS.The end is that we need a machine to do 26,530 MIPS. Thanks to advances in "Hypervisor" technological synergy between the z/VM operating system and the underlying z10 EC hardware, the mainframe can easily run 90 percent utilized when aggregating multiple workloads, so a 29,477 MIPS machine running at 90 percent utilization can handle these 26,530 MIPS.

N-way machines, from a little 2-way Sun Fire X2100 to the might 64-way z10 EC mainframe, are called "Symmetric Multiprocessors". All of the processors or cores are in play, but sometimes they have to taketurns, wait for exclusive access on a shared resource, such as cache or the bus. When your car is stopped at a red light, you are waiting for your turn to use the shared "intersection". As a result, you don't get linear improvement, but rather you get diminishing returns. This is known generically as the "SMP effect", and in IBM documentsthis as [Large System Performance Reference].While a 1-way z10 EC can handle 920 MIPS, the 64-way can only handle30,657 MIPS. The 29,477 MIPS needed for the Sun x2100 workload can be handled by a 61-way, giving you three extraprocessors to handle unexpected peaks in workload.

But are 1500 Linux guest images architecturally possible? A long time ago, David Boyes of[Sine Nomine Associates] ran 41,400 Linux guest images on a single mainframe using his [Test Plan Charlie], and IBM internallywas able to get 98,000 images, and in both cases these were on machines less powerful than the z10 EC. Neitherof these were tests ran I/O intensive workloads, but extreme limits are always worth testing. The 1500-to-1 reduction in IBM's press release is edge-of-the-envelope as well, so in production environments, several hundred guest images are probably more realistic, and still offer significant TCO savings.

The z10 EC can handle up to 60 LPARs, and each LPAR can run z/VM which acts much like VMware in allowing multipleLinux guests per z/VM instance. For 1500 Linux guests, you could have 25 guests each on 60 z/VM LPARs, or 250 guests on each of six z/VM LPARs, or 750 guests on two LPARs. with z/VM 5.3, each LPAR can support up to 256GB of memory and 32 processors, so you need at least two LPAR to use all 64 engines. Also, there are good reasons to have different guests under different z/VM LPARs, such as separating development/test from production workloads. If you had to re-IPLa specific z/VM LPAR, it could be done without impacting the workloads on other LPARs.

To access storage, IBM offers N-port ID Virtualization (NPIV). Without NPIV, two Linux guest images could not accessthe same LUN through the same FCP port because this would confuse the Host Bus Adapter (HBA), which IBM calls "FICON Express" cards. For example, Linux guest 1 asks to read LUN 587 block 32 and this is sent out a specific port, to a switch, to a disk system. Meanwhile, Linux guest 2 asks to read LUN 587 block 49. The data comes back to the z10 EC with the data, gives it to the correct z/VM LPAR, but then what? How does z/VM know which of the many Linux guests to give the data to? Both touched the same LUN, so it is unclear which made the request. To solve this, NPIV assigns a virtual "World Wide Port Name" (WWPN), up to 256 of them per physical port, so you can have up to 256 Linux guests sharing the same physical HBA port to access the same LUN.If you had 250 guests on each of six z/VM LPARs, and each LPAR had its own set of HBA ports, then all 1500 guestscould access the same LUN.

Yes, the z10 EC machines support Sysplex. The concept is confusing, but "Sysplex" in IBM terminology just means that you can have LPARs either on the same machine or on separate mainframes, all sharing the same time source, whether this be a "Sysplex Timer" or by using the "Server Time Protocol" (STP). The z10 EC can have STP over 6 Gbps Infiniband over distance. If you wantedto have all 1500 Linux guests time stamp data identically, all six z/VM LPARs need access to the shared time source. This can help in a re-do or roll-back situation for Oracle databases to complete or back-out "Units of Work" transactions. This time stamp is also used to form consistency groups in "z/OS Global Mirror", formerly called "XRC" for Extended Remote Distance Copy. Currently, the "timestamp" on I/O applies only to z/OS and Linux and not other operating systems. (The time stamp is done through the CDK driver on Linux, and contributed back to theopen source community so that it is available from both Novell SUSE and Red Hat distributions.)To have XRC have consistency between z/OS and Linux, the Linux guests would need to access native CKD volumes,rather than VM Minidisks or FCP-oriented LUNs.

Note: this is different than "Parallel Sysplex" which refers to having up to 32 z/OS images sharing a common "Coupling Facility" which acts as shared memory for applications. z/VM and Linux do not participate in"Parallel Sysplex".

As for the price, mainframes list for as little as "six figures" to as much as several million dollars, but I have no idea how much this particular model would cost. And, of course, this is just the hardware cost. I could not find the math for the $667 per server replacement you mentioned, so don't have details on that.You would need to purchase z/VM licenses, and possibly support contracts for Linux on System z to be fully comparable to all of the software license and support costs of the VMware, Solaris, Linux and/or Windows licenses you run on the x86 machines.

This is where a lot of the savings come from, as a lot of software is licensed "per processor" or "per core", and so software on 64 mainframe processors can be substantially less expensive than 1500 processors or 3000 cores.IBM does "eat its own cooking" in this case. IBM is consolidating 3900 one-application-each rack-mounted serversonto 30 mainframes, for a ratio of 130-to-1 and getting amazingly reduced TCO. The savings are in the followingareas:

Hardware infrastructure. It's not just servers, but racks, PDUs, etc. It turns out to be less expensive to incrementally add more CPU and storage to an existing mainframe than to add or replace older rack-em-and-stack-emwith newer models of the same.

Cables. Virtual servers can talk to each other in the same machine virtually, such as HiperSockets, eliminatingmany cables. NPIV allows many guests to share expensive cables to external devices.

Networking ports. Both LAN and SAN networking gear can be greatly reduced because fewer ports are needed.

Administration. We have Universities that can offer a guest image for every student without having a majorimpact to the sys-admins, as the students can do much of their administration remotely, without having physicalaccess to the machinery. Companies uses mainframe to host hundreds of virtual guests find reductions too!

Connectivity. Consolidating distributed servers in many locations to a mainframe in one location allows youto reduce connections to the outside world. Instead of sixteen OC3 lines for sixteen different data centers, you could have one big OC48 line instead to a single data center.

Software licenses. Licenses based on servers, cores or CPUs are reduced when you consolidate to the mainframe.

Floorspace. Generally, floorspace is not in short supply in the USA, but in other areas it can be an issue.

Power and Cooling. IBM has experienced significant reduction in power consumption and cooling requirementsin its own consolidation efforts.

All of the components of DFSMS (including DFP, DFHSM, DFDSS and DFRMM) were merged into a single product "DFSMS for z/OS" and is now an included element in the base z/OS operating system. As a result of these, customers typically have 80 to 90 percent utilization on their mainframe disk. For the 1500 Linux guests, however, most of the DFSMS features of z/OS do not apply. These functions were not "ported over" to z/VM nor Linux on any platform.

Instead, the DFSMS concepts have been re-implemented into a new product called "Scale-Out File Services" (SOFS) which would provide NAS interfaces to a blendeddisk-and-tape environment. The SOFS disk can be kept at 90 percent utilization because policies can place data, movedata and even expire files, just like DFSMS does for z/OS data sets. SOFS supports standard NAS protocols such as CIFS,NFS, FTP and HTTP, and these could be access from the 1500 Linux guests over an Ethernet Network Interface Card (NIC), which IBM calls "OSA Express" cards.

Lastly, IBM z10 EC is not emulating x86 or x86-64 interfaces for any of these workloads. No doubt IBM and AMD could collaborate together to come up with an AMD Opteron emulator for the S/390 chipset, and load Windows 2003 right on top of it, but that would just result in all kinds of emulation overhead.Instead, Linux on System z guests can run comparable workloads. There are many Linux applications that are functionally equivalent or the same as their Windows counterparts. If you run Oracle on Windows, you could runOracle on Linux. If you run MS Exchange on Windows, you could run Bynari on Linux and let all of your Outlook Expressusers not even know their Exchange server had been moved! Linux guest images can be application servers, web servers, database servers, network infrastructure servers, file servers, firewall, DNS, and so on. For nearly any business workload you can assign to an x86 server in a datacenter, there is likely an option for Linux on System z.

Hope this answers all of your questions, Jon. These were estimates based on basic assumptions. This is not to imply that IBM z10 EC and VMware are the only technologies that help in this area, you can certainly find virtualization on other systems and through other software.I have asked IBM to make public the "TCO framework" that sheds more light on this.As they say, "Your mileage may vary."

If in your travels, Jon, you run into someone interested to see how IBM could help consolidate rack-mounted servers over to a z10 EC mainframe, have them ask IBM for a "Scorpion study". That is the name of the assessment that evaluates a specific clientsituation, and can then recommend a more accurate estimate configuration.

Some people find it surprising that it is often more cost-effective, and power-efficient, to run workloads on mainframe logical partitions (LPARs) than a stack of x86 servers running VMware.

Perhaps they won't be surprised any more. Here is an article in eWeek that explains how IBM isreducing energy costs 80% by consolidating 3,900 rack-optimized servers to 33 IBM System z mainframe servers, running Linux, in its own data centers. Since 1997, IBM has consolidated its 155 strategic worldwide data center locations down to just seven.

I am very pleased that IBM has invested heavily into Linux, with support across servers, storage, software andservices. Linux is allowing IBM to deliver clever, innovative solutions that may not be possible with other operating systems. If you are in storage, you should consider becoming more knowledgeable in Linux.

The older systems won't just end up in a landfill somewhere. Instead, the details are spelled out inthe IBM Press Release:

As part of the effort to protect the environment, IBM Global Asset Recovery Services, the refurbishment and recycling unit of IBM, will process and properly dispose of the 3,900 reclaimed systems. Newer units will be refurbished and resold through IBM's sales force and partner network, while older systems will be harvested for parts or sold for scrap. Prior to disposition, the machines will be scrubbed of all sensitive data. Any unusable e-waste will be properly disposed following environmentally compliant processes perfected over 20 years of leading environmental skill and experience in the area of IT asset disposition.

Whereas other vendors might think that some operational improvements will be enough, such as switching to higher-capacity SATA drives, or virtualizing x86 servers, IBM recognizes that sometimes more fundamental changes are required to effect real changes and real results.

People are confused over various orders of magnitude. News of the economic meltdownoften blurs the distinction between millions (10^6), billions (10^9), and trillions (10^12).To show how different these three numbers are, consider the following:

A million seconds ago - you might have received your last paycheck (12 days)

A billion seconds ago - you were born or just hired on your current job (31 years)

A trillion seconds ago - cavemen were walking around in Asia (31,000 years)

That these numbers confuse the average person is no surprise, but that it confuses marketing people in the storage industry is even more hilarious. I am often correcting people who misunderstandMB (million bytes), GB (billion bytes) and TB (trillion bytes) of information.Take this graph as an example from a recent presentation.

At first, it looks reasonable, back in 2004, black-and-white 2D X-Ray images were only 1MBin size when digitized, but by 2010 there will be fancy 4D images that now take 1TB, representinga 1000x increase. What?When I pointed out this discrepancy, the person who put this chart together didn't know what to fix.Were 4D images only 1GB in size, or was it really a 1000000x increase.

If a 2D image was 1000 by 1000 pixels, each pixel was a byte of information, then a 3D imagemight either be 1000 by 1000 by 1000 [voxels], or 1000 by 1000 at 1000 frames per second (fps). Thefirst being 3D volumetric space, and the latter called 2D+time in the medical field, the rest of us just say "video".4D images are 3D+time, volumetric scans over time, so conceivably these could be quite large in size.

The key point is that advances in medical equipment result in capturing more data, which canhelp provide better healthcare. This would be the place I normally plug an IBM product, like the Grid Medical Archive Solution [GMAS], a blended disk and tape storage solution designed specifically for this purpose.

So, as government agencies look to spend billions of dollars to provide millions of peoplewith proper healthcare, choosing to spend some of this money on a smarter infrastructure can result in creating thousands of jobs and save everyone a lot of money, but more importantly, save lives.

For more on this, check out Adam Christensen's blog post on[Smarter Planet], which points to a podcast byDr. Russ Robertson, chairman of the Counsel of Medical Education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM's Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry.

Wrapping up this week's theme on ways to make the planet smarter, and less confusing, I present IBM's third annual [five in five]. These are five IBM innovations to watch over the next five years, all of which have implications on information storage. Here is a quick [3-minute video] that provides the highlights:

This week is Thanksgiving holiday in the USA, so I thought a good theme would be things I am thankful for.

I'll start with saying that I am thankful EMC has finally announcedAtmos last week. This was the "Maui" part of the Hulk/Maui rumors we heard over a year ago. To quickly recap, Atmos is EMC's latest storage offeringfor global-scale storage intended for Web 2.0 and Digital Archive workloads. Atmos can be sold as just software, or combined with Infiniflex,EMC's bulk, high-density commodity disk storage systems. Atmos supports traditionalNFS/CIFS file-level access, as well as SOAP/REST object protocols.

I'm thankful for various reasons, here's a quick list:

It's hard to compete against "vaporware"

Back in the 1990s, IBM was trying to sell its actual disk systems against StorageTek's rumored "Iceberg" project. It took StorageTek some four years to get this project out,but in the meantime, we were comparing actual versus possibility. The main feature iswhat we now call "Thin Provisioning". Ironically, StorageTek's offering was not commercially successful until IBM agreed to resell this as the IBM RAMAC Virtual Array (RVA).

Until last week, nobody knew the full extent of what EMC was going to deliver on the many Hulk/Maui theories. Severalhinted as to what it could have been, and I am glad to see that Atmos falls short of those rumored possibilities. This is not to say that Atmos can't reach its potential, and certainly some of the design is clever, such as offering native SOAP/REST access.

When I presented SoFS and XIV earlier this year, I mentioned they were designed forthe fast-growing Web 2.0 and Digital Archive workloads that were unique enough to justify their own storage architectures. One criticism was that SoFS appeared to duplicate what could be achieved with dozens of IBM N series NAS boxes connected with Virtual File Manager (VFM). Why invent a new offering with a new architecture?

With the Atmos announcement, EMC now agrees with IBM that the Web 2.0 and DigitalArchive workloads represent a unique enough "use case" to justify a new approach.

New offerings for new workloads will not impact existing offerings for existing workloads

I find it amusing that EMC is quickly defending that Atmos will not eat into its DMXbusiness, which is exactly the FUD they threw out about IBM XIV versus DS8000 earlier this year. In reality, neither the DS8000 nor the DMX were used much for Web 2.0 andDigital Archive workloads in the past. Companies like Google, Amazon and others hadto either build their own from piece parts, or use low-cost midrange disk systems.

Rather, the DS8000 and DMX can now focus on the workloads they were designed for,such as database applications on mainframe servers.

Cloud-Oriented Storage (COS)

Just when you thought we had enough terminology already, EMC introduces yet another three-letter acronym [TLA]. Kudos to EMC for coining phrases to help move newconcepts forward.

Now, when an RFP asks for Cloud-oriented storage, I am thankful this phrase will help serve as a trigger for IBM to lead with SoFS and XIV storage offerings.

Digital archives are different than Compliance Archives

EMC was also quick to point out that object-storage Atmos was different from theirobject-storage EMC Centera. The former being for "digital archives" and the latter for"compliance archives". Different workloads, Different use cases, different offerings.

Ever since IBM introduced its [IBM System Storage DR550] several years ago, EMC Centera has been playing catch-up to match IBM'smany features and capabilities. I am thankful the Centera team was probably too busy to incorporate Atmos capabilities, so it was easier to make Atmos a separate offering altogether. This allows the IBM DR550 to continue to compete against Centera's existingfeature set.

Micro-RAID arrays, logical file and object-level replication

I am thankful that one of the Atmos policy-based feature is replicating individualobjects, rather than LUN-based replication and protection. SoFS supports this forlogical files regardless of their LUN placement, GAM supports replication of files and medical images across geographical sites in the grid, and the XIV supports this for 1MBchunks regardless of their hard disk drive placement. The 1MB chunk size was basedon the average object size from established Web 2.0 and DigitalArchive workloads.

I tried to explain the RAID-X capability of the XIV back in January, under muchcriticism that replication should only be done at the LUN level. I amthankful that Marc Farley on StorageRap coined the phrase[Micro-RAID array] to helpmove this new concept further. Now, file-level, object-level and chunk-level replication can be considered mainstream.

Much larger minimum capacity increments

The original XIV in January was 51TB capacity per rack, and this went up to 79TB per rack for the most recent IBM XIV Release 2 model. Several complained that nobody would purchase disk systems at such increments. Certainly, small and medium size businessesmay not consider XIV for that reason.

I am thankful Atmos offers 120TB, 240TB and 360TB sizes. The companies that purchasedisk for Web 2.0 and Digital Archive workloads do purchase disk capacity in these large sizes. Service providers add capacity to the "Cloud" to support many of theirend-clients, and so purchasing disk capacity to rent back out represents revenue generating opportunity.

Renewed attention on SOAP and REST protocols

IBM and Microsoft have been pushing SOA and Web Services for quite some time now.REST, which stands for [Representational State Transfer] allows static and dynamic HTML message passing over standard HTTP.SOAP, which was originally [Simple Object Access Protocol], and then later renamed to "Service Oriented Architecture Protocol", takes this one step further, allowingdifferent applications to send "envelopes" containing messages and data betweenapplications using HTTP, RPC, SMTP and a variety of other underlying protocols.Typically, these messages are simple text surrounded by XML tags, easily stored asfiles, or rows in databases, and served up by SOAP nodes as needed.

It's hard to show leadership until there are followers

IBM's leadership sometimes goes unnoticed until followerscreate "me, too!" offerings or establish similar business strategies. IBM's leadership in Cloud and Grid computing is no exception.Atmos is the latest me-too product offering in this space, trying pretty muchto address the same challenges that SoFS and XIV were designed for.

So, perhaps EMC is thankful that IBM has already paved the way, breaking throughthe ice on their behalf. I am thankful that perhaps I won't have to deal with as much FUD about SoFS, GAM and XIV anymore.

At IBM, our standard is to have a limit of 200MB per user mailbox. A few of us get exceptions and have up to500MB limit because of the work we do. By comparison, my personal Gmail account is now up to 6500MB. Whenthis limit is exceeded, you are unable to send out any mail until it is brought down below the limit, and a request to be "re-enabled for send" is approved, a situation we call "mail jail".

The biggest culprit are attachments. Only 10 percent of emails have attachments, but those that do take up 90percent of the total space! People attach a 15MB presentation or document, and copy the world ondistribution list. Everyone saves their notes with these attachments, and soon, the limits are blown. Not surprisingly, deduplication has been cited as a "killer app" to address email storage, exactly for this reason.If all the users have their mailboxes all stored on the same deduplication storage device, it might find theseduplicate blocks, and manage to reduce the space consumed.

A better practice would be to avoid this in the first place. Here are the techniques I use instead:

Point to the document in a database

We are heavy users of Lotus Notes databases. These can be encrypted and controlled with Access Control Lists (ACL)that determine who can create or read documents in each database. Annually, all the database ACLs are validatedso that people can confirm that they continue to have a need-to-know for the documents in each database. Sendinga confidential document as a "document link" to a database entry takes only a few bytes, and all the recipientsthat are already on the ACL have access to that document.

Point to the document on a web page

If the document is available on an internal or external website, just send the URL instead of attaching the file.Again, this takes only a few bytes. We have websites accessible only to all internal employees, websites thatcan be accessed only by a subset of employees with special permissions and credentials based on their job role, and websites that are accessible to our IBM Business Partners.

In my case, if I happen to have a blog posting that answers a question or helps illustrate an idea, I will sendthe "permalink" URL of that blog post in my email.

Point to the document on shared NAS file system

Internally, IBM uses a "Global Storage Architecture" (GSA) based on IBM's Scale-Out File Services [SoFS] with everyone getting initially 10GB of disk space to store files, with the option to request more if needed. The system has policy-based support for placing and migrating older data to tape to reduce actual disk usage, and combines a clustered file system with a global name space.

My SoFS space is now up to 25GB, and I store a lot of presentationsand whitepapers that are useful to others. A URL with "ftp://" or "http://" is all you need to point to a filein this manner, and greatly reduces the need for attachments. I can map my space as "Drive X:" on my Windows system,or as a NFS mount point on my Linux system, which allows me to easily drag files back and forth.

Departments that don't need to offer "worldwide access" use NAS boxes instead, such as the IBM System Storage N series.

Pointing to files in a shared space, rather than as attachments in email, may take some getting used to. I've hada few recipients send me requests such as "can you send that as an attachment (not a URL)" because they plan toread it on the airplane or train, where they won't have online connectivity.

"Have you invested in the latest and greatest in collaboration technology but still feel people are still not collaborating? How many Microsoft Sharepoint servers and IBM Quickplaces remain relatively untouched or only used by the organization's technorati? I think it's a big problem because this narrow view of collaboration starts to get the concept a bad name: "yeah, we did collaboration but no one used it." And then there the issue of the vast amount of money wasted and opportunities lost. We can't afford to loose faith in collaboration because the external environment is moving in a direction that mandates we collaborate. The problems we face now and into the future will only increase in complexity and it will require teams of people within and across organizations to solve them."

Well, sending pointers instead of attachments works for me, and has kept me out of "mail jail" for quite some timenow.

CAS continues to flounder, but the rest I can agree with. Regulations are being adopted world wide. Japan has its own Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) style legislation go into effect in 2008.IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center for Data is a great tool to help classify unstructured file systems. IBM CommonStore for email supports both Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino, and can be connected to IBM System Storage DR550 for compliance storage.

Unified storage systems (combined file and block storage target systems) will become increasingly attractive in 2007, because of their ease of use and simplicity.

I agree with this one also. Our sales of IBM N series in 2006 was great, and looking to continue its strong growth in 2007. The IBM N series brings together FCP, iSCSI and NAS protocols into one disk system. With the SnapLock(tm) feature, N series can store both re-writable data, as well as non-erasable, non-rewriteable data, on the same box. Combine the N series gateway on the front-end with SAN Volume Controller on the back-end, and you have an even more powerful combination.

Distributed ROBO backup to disk will emerge as the fastest growing data protection solution in 2007.

IDC had a similar prediction for 2006. ROBO refers to "Remote Office/Branch Office", and so ROBO backup deals with how to back up data that is out in the various remote locations. Do you back it up locally? or send it to a central location?Fortunately, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) supports both ways, and IBM has introduced small disk and tape drives and auto-loaders that can be used in smaller environments like this. I don't know whether "backup to disk" will be the fastest growing, but I certainly agree that a variety of ROBO-related issues will be of interest this year.

2007 will be remembered as the year iSCSI SAN took off because of the much reduced pricing for 10 Gbit iSCSI and the continued deployment of 10 Gbit iSCSI targets.

While I agree that iSCSI is important, I can't say 2007 will be remembered for anything.We have terrible memory in these things. Ask someone what year did Personal Computers (PC) take off, and they will tell you about Apple's famous 1984 commercial. Ask someone when the Internet took off, cell phones took off, etc, and I suspect most will provide widely different answers, but most likely based on their own experience.

For the longest time, I resisted getting a cell phone. I had a roll of quarters in my car, and when I needed to make a call, I stopped at the nearby pay-phone, and made the call. In 1998, pay phones disappeared. You can't find them anymore. That was the year of the cell phones took off, at least for me.

Back to iSCSI, now that you can intermix iSCSI and SAN on the same infrastructure, either through intelligent multi-protocol switches available from your local IBM rep, or through an N series gateway, you can bring iSCSI technology in slowly and gradually. Low-cost copper wiring for 10 Gbps Ethernet makes all this very practical.

Another up-and-coming technology is AoE, or ATA-over-Ethernet. Same idea as iSCSI, but taken down to the ATA level.

CDP will emerge as an important feature on comprehensive data protection products instead of a separate managed product.

Here, CDP stands for Continuous Data Protection. While normal backups work like a point-and-shoot camera, taking a picture of the data once every midnight for example. CDP can record all the little changes like a video camera, with the option to rewind or fast-forward to a specific point in the day. IBM Tivoli CDP for Files, for example, is an excellent complement to IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.

The technology is not really new, as it has been implemented as "logs" or "journals" on databases like DB2 and Oracle, as well as business applications like SAP R/3.

The prediction here, however, relates to packaging. Will vendors "package" CDP into existing backup products, possibly as a separately priced feature, or will they leave it as a separate product that perhaps, like in IBM's case, already is well integrated.

The VTL market growth will continue at a much reduced rate as backup products provide equivalent features directly to disk. Deduplication will extend the VTL market temporarily in 2007.

VTL here refers to Virtual Tape Library, such as IBM TS7700 or TS7510 Virtualization Engine. IBM introduced the first one in 1997, the IBM 3494 Virtual Tape Server, and we have remained number one in marketshare for virtual tape ever since. I find it amusing that people are now just looking at VTL technology to help with their Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape (D2D2T) efforts, when IBM Tivoli Storage Manager has already had the capability to backup to disk, then move to tape, since 1993.

As for deduplication, if you need the end-target box to deduplicate your backups, then perhaps you should investigatewhy you are doing this in the first place? People take full-volume backups, and keep to many copies of it, when a more sophisticated backup software like Tivoli Storage Manager can implement backup policies to avoid this with a progressive backup scheme. Or maybe you need to investigate why you store multiple copies of the same data on disk, perhaps NAS or a clustered file system like IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) could provide you a single copy accessible to many servers instead.

The reason you don't see deduplication on the mainframe, is that DFSMS for z/OS already allows multiple servers to share a single instance of data, and has been doing so since the early 1980s. I often joke with clients at the Tucson Executive Briefing Center that you can run a business with a million data sets on the mainframe, but that there wereprobably a million files on just the laptops in the room, but few would attempt to run their business that way.

Optical storage that looks, feels and acts like NAS and puts archive data online, will make dramatic inroads in 2007.

Marc says he's going out on a limb here, and that's good to make at least one risky prediction. IBM used to have anoptical library emulate disk, called the IBM 3995. Lack of interest and advancement in technology encouraged IBM to withdraw it. A small backlash ensued, so IBM now offers the IBM 3996 for the System p and System i clients that really, really want optical.

As for optical making data available "online", it takes about 20 seconds to load an optical cartridge, so I would consider this more "nearline" than online. Tape is still in the 40-60 second range to load and position to data, so optical is still at an advantage.

Optical eliminates the "hassles of tape"? Tape data is good for 20 years, and optical for 100 years, but nobody keeps drives around that long anyways. In general, our clients change drives every 6-8 years, and migrate the data from old to new. This is only a hassle if you didn't plan for this inevitable movement. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, IBM System Storage Archive Manager, and the IBM System Storage DR550 all make this migration very simple and easy, and can do it with either optical or tape.

The Blue-ray vs. DVD debate will continue through 2007 in the consumer world. I don't see this being a major player in more conservative data centers where a big investment in the wrong choice could be costly, even if the price-per-TB is temporarily in-line with current tape technologies. IBM and others are investing a lot of Research and Development funding to continue the downward price curve for tape, and I'm not sure that optical can keep up that pace.

Well, that's my take. It is a sunny day here in China, and have more meetings to attend.

For those of us in the northern hemisphere, yesterday was this year's Winter Solstice, representingthe shortest amount of daylight between sunrise and sunset. So today, I thought I would blog on my thoughtsof managing scarcity.

Earlier in my career, I had the pleasure to serve as "administrative assistant" to Nora Denzel for the week at a storage conference. My job was to make her look good at the conference, which if you know Nora, doesn't take much. Later, she left IBM to work at HP, and I gotto hear her speak at a conference, and the one thing that I remember most was her statement that thewhole point of "management" was to manage scarcity, as in not enough money in the budget,not enough people to implement change, or not enough resources to accomplish a task.(Nora, I have no idea where you are today, so if you are reading this, send me a note).

Of course, the flip-side to this is that resources that are in abundance are generallytaken for granted. Priorities are focused on what is most scarce. Let's examine some of theresources involved in an IT storage environment:

Capacity - while everyone complains that they are "running out of space", the truth is that most external disk attached to Linux, UNIX, or Windows systems contain only 20-40% data. Many years ago, I visitedan insurance company to talk about a new product called IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. This company had 7TB of disk on their mainframe,and another 7TB of disk scattered on various UNIX and Windows machines. In the room were TWO storage admins for

the mainframe, and 45 storage admins for the distributed systems. My first question was "why so many people forthe mainframe, certainly one of you could manage all of it yourself, perhaps on Wednesday afternoons?" Their response was that they acted as eachother's backup, in case one goes on vacation for two weeks. My follow-up question to the rest of the audience was:"When was the last time you took two weeks vacation?" Mainframes fill their disk and tape storage comfortablyat over 80-90% full of data, primarily because they have a more mature, robust set of management software, likeDFSMS.

Labor - by this I mean skilled labor able to manage storage for a corporation. Some companies I have visitedkeep their new-hires off production systems for the first two years, working only on test or development systemsonly until then. Of course, labor is more expensive in some countries than others. Last year, I was doing a whiteboard session on-site for a client in China, and the last dry-erase pen ran out of ink. I asked for another pen, and they instead sent someone to go re-fill it. I asked wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy another pen, and they said "No, labor is cheap, but ink is expensive." Despite this, China does complain that there is a shortage of askilled IT labor force, so if you are looking for a job, start learning Mandarin.

Power and Cooling - Most data centers are located on raised floors, with large trunks of electrical power and hugeair conditioning systems to deal with all the heat generated from each machine. I have visited the data centers ofclients that are forced now to make decisions on storage based on power and cooling consumption, because the coststo upgrade their aging buildings are too high. Leading the charge is IBM, with technology advancements in chips, cards, and complete systems that use less power, and generate less heat. While energy is still fairly cheap in the grand scheme of things, fears ofGlobal Warmingand declining oil supplies, the costs ofpower and cooling have gotten some news lately. In 1956, Hubbert predicted US would reach peak oil supplies by1965-1970 (it happened in 1971), and this year Simmonsestimated that world-wide oil production began its decline already in 2005. Smart companies like Google have movedtheir server farms to places like Oregon in the Pacific Northwest for cheaper hydroelectric power.

Bandwidth - Last year IBM introduced 4Gbps Fibre Channel and FICON SAN networking gear, along with the servers and storage needed to complete the solution. 4Gbps equates to about 400 MB/sec in data throughput. By comparison, iSCSI is typically run on 1Gbps Ethernet, but has so much overheads that you only get abour 80 MB/sec. Next year, we may see both 8 Gbps SAN, and 10 GbE iSCSI, to provide 800 MB/sec throughputs. My experience is that the SAN is not the bottleneck, instead people run out of bandwidth at the server or storage end first. They may not have a million dollars to buy the fastest IBM System p5 servers, or may not have enough host adapters at the storage system end.

Floorspace - I end with floorspace because it reminds me that many "shortages" are temporary or artificially created. Floorspace is only in short supply because you don't want to knock down a wall, or build a new building, to handle your additional storage requirements.In 1997, Tihamer Toth-Fejel wrote an article for the National Space Society newsletter that estimated that ...Everybody on Earth could live comfortably in the USA on only 15% of our land area, with a population density between that of Chicago and San Francisco. Using agricultural yields attained widely now, the rest of the U.S. would be sufficient to grow enough food for everyone. The rest of the planet, 93.7% of it, would be completely empty.Of course, back in 1997 the world population was only 5.9 billion, and this year it is over 6.5 billion.

This last point brings me back to the concept of food, and I am not talking about doughnuts in the conference room, or pizza while making year-end storage upgrades. I'm talking aboutthe food you work so hard to provide for yourself and your family. The folks at Oxfam came up with a simpleanalogy. If 20 people sit down at your table, representing the world’s population:

3 would be served a gourmet, multi-course meal, while sitting at decorated table and a cushioned chair.

5 would eat rice and beans with a fork and sit on a simple cushion

12 would wait in line to receive a small portion of rice that they would eat with their hands while sitting on the floor.

So for those of you planning a special meal next Monday, be thankful you are one of the lucky three, and hopefulthat IBM will continue to lead the IT industry to help out the other seventeen.

It has always been the case in fast pace technology areas that you can't tell the players without a program card, andthis is especially true for storage.

When analyzing each acquistion move, you need to think of what is driving it. What are the motives?Having been in the storage business 20 years now, and seen my share of acquisitions, both from within IBM,as well as competition, I have come up with the following list of motives.

Talent

Although slavery was abolished in the US back in the 1800's, and centuries earlier everywhere else, many acquisitionsseem to be focused on acquiring the people themselves, rather than the products or client list. I have seen statistics such as "We retained 98% of the people!" In reality, these retentions usually involve costly incentives,sign-in bonuses, stock options, and the like. Desptie this, people leave after a few years, often because ofpersonality or "corporate culture" clash. For example, many former STK employees seem to be leaving after their company was acquired by Sun Microsystems.

Marketshare

If you can't beat them, join them. Acquisitions can often be used by one company to raise its ranking in marketshare, eliminating smaller competitors. And now that you have acquired their client list, perhaps you can sellthem more of your original set of products!

Symantec had acquired Veritas, which in turn had acquired a variety of other smaller players, and the end result is that they are now #1 backup software provider, even though none of theirproducts holds a candle to IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager. Meanwhile, EMC acquired Avamar to try to get more into the backup/recovery game, but most analysts still find EMC down in the #4 or #5 place in this category.

Next month,Brocade's acquisition of McData should take effect, furthering its marketshare in SAN switch equipment.

Portfolio

Prior to my current role as "brand market strategist" for System Storage, I was a "portfolio manager" where wetried to make sure that our storage product line investments were balanced. This was a tough job, as the investmentshad to balance the right development investments into different technologies, including patent portfolios.Despite IBM's huge research budget, I am not surprised that some clever inventions of new technologies comefrom smaller companies, that then get acquired once their results appear viable.

Value Shift

The last motive is value shift. This is where companies try to re-invent themselves, or find that they are stuck in acommodity market rut, and wish to expand into more profitable areas.

LSI Logic acquisition of StoreAge is a good exampleof this. Most of the major storage vendors have already shifted to software and services to provide customer value,as predicted in 1990's by Clayton Christensen in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma". The rest are still strugglingto develop the right strategy, but leaning in this general direction.

In last week's System Storage Portfolio Top Gun class in Dallas, some of the students were not familiarwith Really Simple Syndication (RSS). For the uninitiated, this can be intimidating.I thought a quick overview of what I've done might help:

Use Technorati to search other blogs for keywords or phrases I am looking for.

When I find a blog that I like to continue tracking, I "add" it to my subscription list on bloglines. Just hit "add" and copy the URL of the blog you want to track. Bloglines will figure out the RSS keywords required.I track eight blogs at the momemnt, but some people with lots of time on their hands track 20 or more. It is easy to unsubscribe, so don't be afraid to try some out for a few days.

Since I was actually going to run a blog of my own, I read a few books on the topic. One I recommend is "Naked Conversations" by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, both experienced bloggers.

Finally, I am not big on spell checking, but most places have the option to preview your post or comment before it actually gets posted, which is not a bad idea if you use any HTML tags.

For a quick taste of blogging, consider using Data Storage Blogger Feed Reader. This has a lot of blogs on the topic of storage, already added and categorized for your convenience, ready for your perusal.

I am sure there are many other ways to enjoy the Blogosphere, but this works for me.[Read More]

I get a lot of suggestions for what to put on my blog.I realize that tweets are limited to 140 characters, so pointing to a video URL without muchexplanation or warning can be dangerous. An email can at least add appropriate warnings,such NSFW (Not Safe For Work) or "sorry if this offends you". The only warning I got fora video posted to YouTube by "StorageNetworkDud" was this short email:

"Sorry about the language they have used in some translations, but not sure who put this. It was on twitter."

Fortunately, I have my browser set up not to automatically play YouTube videos. The titlehelped warn me of the content, which turned out to be a [fan-subbed] scene from a World War II movie with brown-shirted tyrannical leader of an evil empire talking to his top generals. He dismisses all but threewith "Hollis, Burke, and Twomey stay in here" followed by a lengthy recap of EMC's recent troublesin the marketplace. At least in the video, the fuhrer correctly follows Tim Sander's advice:"if you have to tell someone bad news, say it in person."

While I understand that many people don't like EMC, the #3 storagevendor in the world, this type of "geek humor" hits a new low. The video was posted over amonth ago, but in light of the recent [shooting in Washington DC], I felt it was just notappropriate to post it here.

Readers, I appreciate all the suggestions, but give me some better warning next time!

Continuing this week's theme on Cloud Computing, Dynamic Infrastructure and Data Center Networking, IBM unveiled details of an advanced computing system that will be able to compete with humans on Jeopardy!, America’s favorite quiz television show. Additionally, officials from Jeopardy! announced plans to produce a human vs. machine competition on the renowned show.

For nearly two years, IBM scientists have been working on a highly advanced Question Answering (QA) system, codenamed "Watson" after IBM's first president, [Thomas J. Watson]. The scientists believe that the computing system will be able to understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on Jeopardy!Produced by Sony Pictures Television, the trivia questions on Jeopardy! cover a broad range of topics, such as history, literature, politics, film, pop culture, and science. It poses a grand challenge for a computing system due to the variety of subject matter, the speed at which contestants must provide accurate responses, and because the clues given to contestants involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities at which humans excel and computers traditionally do not. Watson will incorporate massively parallel analytical capabilities and, just like human competitors, Watson will not be connected to the Internet or have any other outside assistance.

If this all sounds familiar, you might remember some of the events that have led up to this:

In 1984, the movie ["The Terminator"] introduced the concept of [Skynet], a fictional computer system developed by the militarythat becomes self-aware from its advanced artificial intelligence.

In 1997, an IBM computer called Deep Blue defeated World Chess Champion [Garry Kasparov] in a famous battle of human versus machine. To compete at chess, IBM built an extremely fast computer that could calculate 200 million chess moves per second based on a fixed problem. IBM’s Watson system, on the other hand, is seeking to solve an open-ended problem that requires an entirely new approach – mainly through dynamic, intelligent software – to even come close to competing with the human mind. Despite their massive computational capabilities, today’s computers cannot consistently analyze and comprehend sentences, much less understand cryptic clues and find answers in the same way the human brain can.

In 2005, Ray Kurzweil wrote [The Singularity is Near] referring to the wonders that artificial intelligence will bring to humanity.

The research underlying Watson is expected to elevate computer intelligence and human-to-computer communication to unprecedented levels. IBM intends to apply the unique technological capabilities being developed for Watson to help clients across a wide variety of industries answer business questions quickly and accurately.

In the post [Flowing Workflow], the folks over at Eightbar point to the latest 3D work being done with IBM Lotus Sametime.

IBM Sametime is IBM's instant messaging facility, which has been extended to include Voice over IP (VOIP) capability similar to Skype, and now is being developed as a launch point for 3D impromptu meetings "in-world", similar to [Second Life].

With many companies facing hard times and considering travel restrictions for face-to-faceinternal meetings, an information infrastructure that adopts this technology might be a reasonable alternative.

In Monday's post, [IBM Information Infrastructure launches today], I explained how this strategic initiative fit into IBM's New EnterpriseData Center vision. The launch was presented at the IBM Storage and Storage Networking Symposium to over 400 attendeesin Montpelier, France, with corresponding standing-room-only crowds in New York and Tokyo.

This post will focus on Information Retention, the third of the four-part series this week.

Here's another short 2-minute video, on Information Retention

Let's start with some interesting statistics.Fellow blogger Robin Harris on his StorageMojo blog has an interesting post:[Our changing file workloads],which discusses the findings of study titled"Measurement and Analysis of Large-Scale Network File System Workloads"[14-page PDF]. This paper was a collaborationbetween researchers from University of California Santa Cruz and our friends at NetApp.Here's an excerpt from the study:

Compared to Previous Studies:

Both of our workloads are more write-oriented. Read to write byte ratios have significantly decreased.

National Public Radio (NPR) had an interesting piece the other day. By analyzing old photos, a researcher for Cold War Analysis was able to identify an interesting [pattern for Russian presidents]. (Be sure to listen to the 3-minute audio to hear a hilarious song about the results!)

Which brings me to my own collection of "old photos". I bought my first digital camera in the year 2000,and have taken over 15,000 pictures since then. Before that,I used 35mm film camera, getting the negatives developed and prints made. Some of these date back to my years in High School and College. I have a mix of sizes, from 3x5, 4x6 and 5x7 inches,and sometimes I got double prints.Only a small portion are organized intoscrapbooks. The rest are in envelopes, prints and negatives, in boxes taking up half of my linen closet in my house.Following the success of the [Library of Congress using flickr],I decided the best way to organize these was to have them digitized first. There are several ways to do this.

Flat-bed scanner

This method is just too time consuming. Lift the lid place 1 or a few prints face down on the glass, close the lid,press the button, and then repeat. I estimate 70 percent of my photos are in [landscape orientation], and 30 percent in [portrait mode]. I can either spend extra time toorient each photo correctly on the glass, or rotate the digital image later.

Sheet-feed scanner

I was pleased to learn that my Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 sheet-feed scanner can take in a short stack (dozen or so) photos, and generate JPEG format files for each. I can select 150, 300 or 600dpi, and five levels of JPEG compression.All the photos feed in portrait mode, which I can then rotate later on the computer once digitized.A command line tool called [ImageMagick] can help automate the rotations.While I highly recommend the ScanSnap scanner, this is still a time-consuming process for thousands of photos.

"The best way to save your valuable photos may be by eliminating the paper altogether. Consider making digital images of all your photos."

Here's how it works:You ship your prints (or slides, or negatives) totheir facility in Irvine, California. They have a huge machine that scans them all at 300dpi, no compression, andthey send back your photos and a DVD containing digitized versions in JPEG format, all for only 50 US dollars plusshipping and handling, per thousand photos. I don't think I could even hire someone locally to run my scanner for that!

The deal got better when I contacted them. For people like me with accounts on Facebook, flickr, MySpace or Blogger,they will [scan your first 1000 photos for free] (plus shipping and handling). I selected a thousand 4x6" photos from my vast collection, organized them into eight stacks with rubber bands,and sent them off in a shoe box. The photos get scanned in landscape mode, so I had spent about four hours in preparing what I sent them, making sure they were all face up, with the top of the picture oriented either to the top or left edge.For the envelopes that had double prints, I "deduplicated" them so that only one set got scanned.

The box weighed seven pounds, and cost about 10 US dollars to send from Tucson to Irvinevia UPS on Tuesday. They came back the following Monday, all my photos plus the DVD, for 20 US dollars shipping and handling. Each digital image is about 1.5MB in size, roughly 1800x1200 pixels in size, so easily fit on a single DVD. The quality is the sameas if I scanned them at 300dpi on my own scanner, and comparable to a 2-megapixel camera on most cell phones.Certainly not the high-res photos I take with my Canon PowerShot, but suitable enough for email or Web sites. So, for about 30 US dollars, I got my first batch of 1000 photos scanned.

ScanMyPhotos.com offers a variety of extra priced options, like rotating each file to the correct landscape or portrait orientation, color correction, exact sequence order, hosting them on their Web site online for 30 days to share with friends and family, and extra copies of the DVD.All of these represent a trade-off between having them do it for me for an additional fee, or me spending time doing it myself--either before in the preparation, or afterwards managing the digital files--so I can appreciate that.

Perhaps the weirdest option was to have your original box returned for an extra $9.95? If you don't have a hugecollection of empty shoe boxes in your garage, you can buy a similarly sized cardboard box for only $3.49 at the local office supply store, so I don't understand this one. The box they return all your photos in can easily be used for the next batch.

I opted not to get any of these extras. The one option I think they should add would be to have them just discardthe prints, and send back only the DVD itself. Or better yet, discard the prints, and email me an ISO file of the DVD that I can burn myself on my own computer.Why pay extra shipping to send back to me the entire box of prints, just so that I can dump the prints in the trash myself? I will keep the negatives, in case I ever need to re-print with high resolution.

Overall, I am thoroughlydelighted with the service, and will now pursue sending the rest of my photos in for processing, and reclaim my linen closet for more important things. Now that I know that a thousand 4x6 prints weighs 7 pounds, I can now estimate how many photos I have left to do, and decide on which discount bulk option to choose from.

With my photos digitized, I will be able to do all the things that IBM talks about with Information Retention:

Place them on an appropriate storage tier. I can keep them on disk, tape or optical media.

Easily move them from one storage tier to another. Copying digital files in bulk is straightforward, and as new techhologies develop, I can refresh the bits onto new media, to avoid the "obsolescence of CDs and DVDs" as discussed in this article in[PC World].

Share them with friends and family, either through email, on my Tivo (yes, my Tivo is networked to my Mac and PC and has the option to do this!), or upload themto a photo-oriented service like [Kodak Gallery or flickr].

Keep multiple copies in separate locations. I could easily burn another copy of the DVD myself and store in my safe deposit box or my desk at work.With all of the regional disasters like hurricanes, an alternative might be to backup all your files, including your digitized photos, with an online backup service like [IBM Information Protection Services] from last year's acquisition of Arsenal Digital.

If the prospect of preserving my high school and college memories for the next few decades seems extreme,consider the [Long Now Foundation] is focused on retaining information for centuries.They areeven suggesting that we start representing years with five digits, e.g., 02008, to handle the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect 8,000 years from now. IBM researchers are also working on [long-term preservation technologies and open standards] to help in this area.

For those who only read the first and last paragraphs of each post, here is my recap:Information Retention is about managing [information throughout its lifecycle], using policy-based automation to help with the placement, movement and expiration. An "active archive" of information serves to helpgain insight, innovate, and make better decisions. Disk, tape, and blended disk-and-tape solutions can all play a part in a tiered information infrastructure for long-term retention of information.